Like this:

I have been taking this beautiful, writing workshop, aptly titled “writing from your chakras” for nearly a month now. Each week we work with one chakra or energy center within our etheric bodies and attempt to unblock the creative energy within each one of them for the purpose of writing . This week was for us to work with the Ajna or third eye chakra. I intended to do a freewrite right after the meditation, but the meditation brought back memories from a conversation with a dear friend, that I have tried to encapsulate in this piece.

I see a little girl when I look into the mirror today, that little girl is Me, Tina K. I wonder if she is the child in me or is it me as a child, one who has never grown up. I always see this little girl when I am feeling lost, hurt and needy. She shows me that while I think I might have grown up; there are parts of me that want to still hide under the bed to get away from all that I am afraid of seeing. The only difference are the sizes and nature of my tormentors, the dominating older sister is now replaced by my dominating mother in law who believes that I am only just a caretaker, of her grown up son, one whom she has so painstakingly moulded to become the fine person that he is. My husband is version 2 of the school bully, who had meticulously shredded my self-confidence all through my school years and which I had taken about 10 years to rebuild, only to be hurt by the shards of my broken self-esteem, as it hit the walls of a loveless & difficult marriage.

What I don’t see is the pain in the eyes of the adult face, my face, which now looks back at me, maybe that is because my right eye is swollen from the beating, last night. I had dared to correct my top B-school pass out husband, in front of his friends. Of course, I am going to use the best MAC concealer to hide the bruising, and laugh my unhappy laugh as I will explain to my colleagues, how careless I was to have bumped into the door, Again. I wonder, if they are able to see right through my lies? Perhaps they don’t, because if they do, I wonder why none of them have come forward to confront me and my lies. Well, maybe if they did, they wouldn’t have any more office cooler gossips to break their office monotony. You ask, why I don’t tell my parents or family about all of this and I could tell you that they wouldn’t understand, but that’s not true at all. It’s what I have seen in their eyes, on those occasions that I have gone to meet them with the marks on my face, and when they have lowered their eyes and pretended to see right through me. I see in their eyes, both the understanding and the pain, but it’s overshadowed by the shame that addressing the questions in my eyes would bring to them. So we decide to not see the obvious.

As I look into the mirror, I see how all the characters in my life’s story are blind like me, afraid to see the truth of mine or their own lives. Even though they can see, they shut their eyes for fear of being judged and ridiculed. I don’t see myself anymore, I am invisible to myself, all I see in the mirror are the many faces of the characters that I play- wife, daughter-in-law, sister friend, but right now the face looking back at me is that of a broken woman, who is asking me to help her find herself and happiness once again, She wants me to remember how beautiful life used to be. I look back at her and softly say “I am sorry”.

My make-up is done, the concealer and the kohl have both filled the cracks on my face, I look good once again, I put the bindi near my third eye, in my case this bindi is the dot, the full stop, to all my dreams and it’s me telling myself to stop dreaming. I take a step back and look at myself full length, the bags are packed, I am headed to the hospital, praying that my unborn child is a boy, not because that would make my mother-in-law happy, its only because, I don’t want to see another woman looking at herself in a similar mirror and applying a concealer around her swollen eyes twenty years later. Like Mother Like Daughter, that, I absolutely do not want to see.

In conversation with a BFF and the topic almost always meanders to men or the lack of “suitable men” in our lives.. She is a dreamer and I love her for that, she still believes in fairytales and knights on a white horse or an Audi(interchanging it with the contemporary knight vehicle)….

While a part of me wants to say yes to all the wonderful romantic stuff, the very Capri part of my mind is going”bollocks, there isn’t anything like ” Happily ever afters” anymore. that .happens only in some ROMCOMS and even, they are getting all practical now… I want to tell my friend “enough”, snap out of it.. Fairytales are just that, tales… We are at an age where no one, just rings the doorbell and enters your home and heart , in that order..guys don’t even open doors for us women anymore..

But , then I wonder, if is there an age when us girls stop believing or living iin fairy tales? Everyday, thousands of 4 year old’s …meets Cinderella and her charming Prince and in a nanosecond , another one of our species bites the dust .Somewhere our girl DNA gets mutated and sends out signals and hormones that makes us never forget what we had read as a child and we refuse to believe otherwise, even the more hardened ones still want to hold on to the magic land of their childhood…I wish there should have been a parallel story track for guys too, maybe then we’d really be equal in this world..

Anyway, I don’t tell me friend to stop dreaming, because her dreams are only about LOVE…the one thing I hear keeps the world going…I see her become a better person, every time, in order to become the person she wants to meet.. She sure does not want to attract someone who is not as equally loving, sensitive and loving as she is..So maybe fairy tales aren’t such a bad deal, they make us girls want and be treated as princesses and to never to short sell ourselves when it comes to men.. If only, we remembered that everytime we were in a relationship, and asked ourselves few Fairytale inspired questions; Do i feel like the princess that I am? does the man have the patience to wait for me, for as long as it takes for me to figure out and my BFF’s problems ? Is he able to spend a couple hours a week with my especially since they aren’t as wicked as Cindrella’s step-family?Will he able to love me when my feet get a little bigger coz Ive put on some post pregnancy weight? And also, while staring into eachothers eyes is a lot of fun, can we actually have great conversations and laugh a lot when we are together? And most importantly, ask yourself “Am I happy to just be “ME”, around him”? and if the answer is YES then , I guess your fairy tale has just come true, and for the rest of us, its time for us to wait for our “Prince in the Audi”..He cant be that far behind..